The campaign structure refers to the way an advertising account is organized. It involves the hierarchy of accounts, campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords that you create to manage and optimize your advertising activities. A well-structured campaign can help you better organize your ads, target specific audiences, and achieve your advertising goals effectively.

Account: This is the highest level of organization in the ad platforms. On many platforms, a “manager” account can give you access to multiple ad accounts with a single login. The account for a particular client or business controls user access, billing information, communication settings and of course all your campaigns.

Campaign: Within your account, you create individual campaigns, each with its own budget, settings, and advertising goals. Campaigns are typically used to group together a set of related products, services, or marketing objectives. For example, you might have separate campaigns for different product lines, target regions, or promotional campaigns.

Some ad platforms, such as Google Ads, recommend you to consolidate your campaigns and try to minimize their number in the account. Main reasons to launch a new campaign include budget control, campaign type or a specific geographical area. In contrast, platforms such as Meta Ads can provide better performance if you run multiple campaigns with similar objectives, but different audience targeting and ad creative combinations.

Ad Group (or Ad Set): One level below the campaign in the hierarchy is the ad group (or the ad set, depending on which ad platform you are using). Within each campaign, ad groups allow you to organize your ad creatives, audience targeting, bids and keywords more specifically. For example, in a search campaign, you can group matching keywords and ad creatives. In a video campaign, you can experiment with different audience targeting methods and videos. The best practice is to match your ad group structure to your advertising themes. These themes can be based on different factors such as product type, audience type and different promotions.

Ad creatives: Within each ad group, you can create ad creatives that match the audience, keywords and other theme elements of that particular ad group. These can include various types of ads, such as text ads, image ads, responsive ads, or video ads. Most ad platforms reward highly relevant ad creatives. Therefore you should pay particular attention to the themes of your ad creatives (including your offers and promotions) and make sure that these match the other elements of the ad group your ad creatives are in.

Keywords: Keywords are a fundamental element of many ad platforms. They are the search terms that users enter into search engines or other search bars (for example on Amazon). You have to choose relevant keywords for each ad group to determine when your ads will be displayed. Effective keyword selection is crucial to ensure your ads are shown to the right audience and increase the chances of attracting relevant clicks.

H. Your account and campaign structure is the foundation of your search engine marketing strategy. By structuring your campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords thoughtfully, you can better organize your advertising efforts, optimize targeting, and measure the performance of your campaigns. It allows you to allocate budgets efficiently, create relevant ads, and reach the right audience. It can also save you tons of time as your account grows. A well structured account can make regular tasks such as optimization and reporting much quicker.